The Book of Revelation Read Online Free Page B

washing him the previous night, and, judging by the angle of her head and the cautious way she moved across the room, the bowl was full of water. She set it down on the mat, no more than a foot away from him, then left the room again, returning moments later with a towel, a flannel and a washing-bag. Settling beside him, she unzipped the bag and took out a disposable razor and a can of unscented shaving-foam. She shook the can a few times, sprayed foam on to the palm of one hand, then used her other hand to smooth it on to his face and neck. She had bitten her nails so far down, he noticed, that they were almost circular, which made her fingers look blunt, like roots.
    She shaved him quite differently to the way he would have shaved himself. She started with the groove that ran from the base of his nose to the middle of his upper lip, small vertical strokes of the razor, then she moved along the right side of his upper lip and out across his cheekbone towards his ear, still using the same small strokes. After finishing the right side of his face, she returned to his upper lip, the left side now, and repeated the same manoeuvre—or, rather, its mirror-image—before dropping downwards to his chin, and then still lower, to his neck. He noticed that she held her breath each time she laid the blade against his skin, then let the air rush out of her as she leaned back and rinsed the razor in the bowl, and he thought of children, how they do exactly the same thing when they’re drawing. He couldn’t remember if he had ever been shaved by anyone before. He didn’t think he had. She was surprisingly good at it. He never once had the sense that she might cut him.
    As she was about to complete the job, a sharp pain twisted through his lower abdomen, just above his groin. He told her that he needed to use the bathroom. She withdrew immediately, returning a few moments later with one of her accomplices. He watched the two women as they went through the ritual of locking and unlocking, and, once again, he was struck by how smooth the operation was, as if they had rehearsed it many times. As before, one of the women, the tall one, waited outside the bathroom door while the other one, the one with no fingernails, escorted him inside. She stayed in the room with him throughout, even though he was doing more than urinating this time. It was like water, what fell out of him; it had the pungent, almost rotten smell of game. For once, the woman’s hood seemed fitting—a display of delicacy on her part, as if she were averting her gaze.
    When he had finished, she wiped him clean, pulled up his underpants and flushed the chain. She behaved exactly as she had behaved the night before: she was methodical, efficient—matter-of-fact. Afterwards, she stepped back to the hand-basin. There was a flaw in the white porcelain, at the base of the hot tap. He saw her touch it with one finger. She seemed to think it was something that could be dislodged—a hair, perhaps. When it didn’t move, though, when she realised it was just a crack, a murmur came out of her, as if she felt she had been the victim of a practical joke.
    While the woman held her hands under the hot water—how odd, he thought, to have someone wash their hands on your behalf—he stood back and looked around, trying to find out more about the room. A naked light-bulb hung from the ceiling. Philips. Sixty watts. The floor was lino—white dots on a dark-grey ground, a kind of stippling effect, like a TV screen when all the stations have closed down. To the left of the toilet there were two larger splashes of white that didn’t appear to be part of the original design. Looking closer, he discovered they were paint. They must have dropped from some decorator’s brush. He nodded quickly to himself. Other people’s carelessness was something he needed reminding of. He had to believe that people could slip up. Make mistakes.
    •
    Back in the white room he waited until the women had